Project Sidewalk Presented at the GroupSight Workshop
Kotaro Hara gave an invited presentation about the Project Sidewalk at GroupSight workshop, held in Austin Texas during the HCOMP conference this year. In the presentation, Kotaro introduced our work on locating sidewalk accessibility features by combining crowdsourcing, computer vision, machine learning, and Google Street View. [read more]
HandSight Featured in New Scientist
The HandSight project was recently featured in New Scientist, a British science and technology magazine. The article described our work in using a finger-mounted camera to read printed text.
New Scientist: Tiny fingertip camera helps blind people read without braille
[read more]
Accessibility Research Team at the Diversity in Computing Summit
We were honored to participate in the inaugural Diversity in Computing Summit. Makeability Lab and Inclusive Design Lab members presented a joint session on their accessibility research. The session, entitled "Interactive Computational Tools for Accessibility," covered work on Project Sidewalk (by Manaswi Saha), Temporal Tracking of Accessibility Features in Cities (by Ladan Najafizadeh) , Health and Fitness for the Mobility Impaired (by Meethu Malu), Accessible On-body Interaction for the Visually Impaired (by Uran Oh) and HandSight (by Lee Stearns). Talk slides are available here. [read more]
We were happy to be invited to speak at the Tech+Design workshop at Technica, the largest all-women hackathon in the US. Four Makeability Lab members spoke (Soheil, Manaswi, Liang, and Majeed) who talked about their research, their design process, and designing for social impact. [read more]
HandSight Presentation at ASSETS 2016
Lee Stearns presented the HandSight team's work at the ASSETS 2016 conference, held in Reno, Nevada this year. The presentation covered our recently published TACCESS journal article titled "Evaluating Haptic And Auditory Directional Guidance To Assist Blind People In Reading Printed Text Using Finger-Mounted Cameras." [read more]
Project SqueezaPulse Conditionally Accepted by TEI'17
We are excited to announce that Project SqueezaPulse has been conditionally accepted to TEI 2017 Papers. [read more]
Project Sidewalk in The Diamondback
The UMD newspaper, The Diamondback, just wrote a nice piece on Project Sidewalk. Check it out here! [read more]
Majeed Featured in Maker Spotlight
Majeed Kazemitabaar was featured in Make's Maker Spotlight today for his work on maker tools for children. The article covers Majeed's background, his work on MakerWear, and some shout outs to the HCIL Hackerspace, the Makeability Lab, BodyVis, and alumni member Leyla Norooz! Congrats Majeed! [read more]
Join us at the Silver Spring Maker Faire
The Makeability Lab and the HCIL are participating in the Silver Spring Maker Faire which is going on today from 12pm - 5pm. Our own Majeed Kazemitabaar will also be giving a special presentation on MakerWear as the "Maker in our Midst" at 2:15pm on the Main Stage. Full details are available here:
http://www.makerfairesilverspring.com/
[read more]
Jonah Chazan First Place at HackMIT!
Our former high school intern, Jonah Chazan, and his team won first place (!) at HackMIT this year for their work on Window Share--a system that allows you to easily share content between computers by drag and drop gestures (see video here). Congrats Jonah and teammates! [read more]
